Human Decision Quotes

What most people don't realize is that dams and other structures are not permanent fixtures on the landscape. They are there because we made a political decision to build them. They didn't get there by accident.

I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn't understand both is a damned fool.

But a most pernicious error widely prevails that Scripture has only so much weight as is conceded to it by the consent of the church. As if the eternal and inviolable truth of God depended upon the decision of men!

Technology is usually fairly neutral. It’s like a hammer, which can be used to build a house or to destroy someone’s home. The hammer doesn’t care. It is almost always up to us to determine whether the technology is good or bad.

The universe doesn't decide what's right or not right. You do.

The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.

Of course, technology is not an exogenous force over which humans have no control. We are not constrained by a binary choice between acceptance and rejection. Rather, the decisions we make every day as citizens, consumers, and investors guide technological progress.

Human action is purposeful behavior.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

Our cities are not polluted or congested because they have to be. They are what they are because that's how we made them.

Our future and our fate lie in our wills more than in our hands, for our hands are but the instruments of our wills.

God leaves to Man the choice of Forms in Government; and those who constitute one Form, may abrogate it.

We set up a certain aim, and put ourselves of our own will into the power of a certain current. Once having done that, we find ourselves committed to usages and customs which we had not before fully known, but from which we cannot depart without giving up the end which we have chosen. But we have no right, therefore, to claim that we are under the yoke of necessity. We might as well say that the man whom we see struggling vainly in the current of Niagara could not have helped jumping in.

There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.

We're in an age of enlightenment, and we have a choice as a society which path to take.

Economic systems ... have never arranged themselves by themselves. It is men who do the ordering according to their attitudes, desires and understanding of things. Changes take place, not independent of man's will, but on account of man's will.

The life-efficiency and adaptability of the computer must be questioned. Its judicious use depends upon the availability of its human employers quite literally to keep their own heads, not merely to scrutinize the programming but to reserve for themselves the right of ultimate decision. No automatic system can be intelligently run byautomatonsor by people who dare not assert human intuition, human autonomy, human purpose.

One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this.

What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.

The problem with experiments has always been that human beings make the decisions on whether or not the animals have benefitted from the treatment.

It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.

I've always been obsessed about how people choose - or are destined - for the paths they take.

It is not a Pandora's box that science opens; it is, rather, a treasure chest. We, humanity, can choose whether or not to take out the discoveries and use them, and for what purpose.

any system, in which the final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the source of all authority are human, is doomed to failure because it deifies human beings by designating others than God as lords over men.